Game 10, Mariners at Indians
Happy Felix Day!
Travis Hafner, Victor Martinez, Grady Sizemore, and Jhonny Peralta anchor one of the best line-ups in baseball. The Indians can flat out hit. Even their bad hitters are not bad hitters.
But it doesn’t matter. King Felix is on the hill. The best hitters in baseball don’t stand a chance against the Royal Curveball when Felix has even mediocre command. Every night is a possible no hitter, and every batter is a potentially embarrassing strikeout.
Felix Day only comes around 30-35 times a year. Don’t take it for granted.
Long Live the King.
Caple on The King
In case you forgot it was Felix Day, and you know who you are, Jim Caple tosses us a Felix worship piece at ESPN. It’s typical Caple. The intro:
Now that Felix Hernandez is no longer a teenager (he turned 20 on Saturday), the Mariners will stop pampering their star prospect.
Oh, they’ll still only pitch him on Catholic feast days in months that have an R in them. And they’ll still sacrifice a rooster and bury a potato in the mound at midnight under a full moon before his starts. And they’ll make sure he is vaccinated against rubella, typhoid, tetanus, polio, whooping cough and dengue fever. And they’ll still make sure he sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber the night before a game, avoids direct sunlight the day of a game and wears ChapStick and 50-block sunscreen during the game. And they’ll still check the wind speed before game time to make sure it isn’t blowing more than 4.73 miles per hour from the north-northwest. And he’ll still eat only organic vegetables and wait at least wait one hour after eating a meal before stepping onto the field. And they’ll still have a Brinks crew drive him in from the bullpen for the first pitch and have a Cub Scout walk him back to the mound each inning. And they’ll still have a team doctor monitor his blood pressure between pitches and still pack him in a padded container between innings. And after the game, they’ll still have the team trainer and a Swiss masseuse rub down his right arm with Bengay, flaxseed oil, Brylcreem, Heinz 57, Neatsfoot oil, holy water and WD-40, wrap it with four rolls of duct tape and then store him in a wine cellar at a precise temperature of 55 degrees with a humidity level of exactly 79 percent. And after the season, they’ll once again seal him in carbonite and store him next to Han Solo for the winter.
Funny, fluffy, and Seattle-oriented? Check. Go Caple go.
Breathe
And now, after running the Gauntlet of Death, the M’s actually get to face a below average major league pitcher. I don’t want to belittle Jason Johnson, who I made a case for acquiring in the offseason, but he’s just not the caliber of pitcher the M’s have faced in their first nine games. You want to see some tough competition? Check this out. The combined 2005 average performance of the starting pitchers the M’s have faced to date:
14-9, 3.65 ERA, 207 IP, 58 BB, 154 K, 23 HR allowed.
Or, if you like more advanced metrics:
4.42 FIP, 4.23 xFIP, 2.4 BB/G, 7.0 K/G, .96 HR/G
2.5 walks, 7 strikeouts, and keeping the ball in the park? That’s basically like facing the 2005 Kevin Millwood. Nine times in a row.
Bring on Jason Johnson.
Game 9, Mariners at Indians
4:05. RHP Gil Mech v RHP Paul Byrd.
Lawton is off the restricted list after his 10-day suspension. Time went fast, blah blah blah. This set off a couple of weird moves: Jeff Harris was optioned to Tacoma, Guillermo Quiroz was taken off the roster via designation for assignment, and Rene Rivera was recalled.
I’m as baffled as you are. Why did Quiroz got the boot? It was a nice little pickup. Did he turn out to have personality issues or something?
And I’m a little surprised that they’re moving off the extra-beefy bullpen, given that the starters are getting rocked.
Great Nickname
You’re probably aware that the M’s recently traded RHP Marcos Carvajal to the Devil Rays for fellow RHP Jose de la Cruz. What you might not have known is that de la Cruz, who stands 6-7 and weighs 245 pounds, is known as “The Aircraft Carrier.” Thanks to Baseball America’s Trade Central for that one.
Game 8, Mariners at Indians
LHP Washburn v LHP Lee. 4:05, KSTW-11.
Will Washburn be able to dominate a team he’s not angry at?
The Mariners front office the last two years has pointed at the Indians as an example of what they didn’t want to do. We’ve agreed — Dave wrote a great post a long time ago about how the M’s financial advantage means that you can wallpaper over a tear-down job as you rebuild, for instance — and we see a lot of comments when this subject come up that say, essentially, “yeah, that would be soooo horrible, if the Mariners rebuilt as quickly and as effectively as the Indians have.”
And while it’s of course a more complicated situation than that, it’s true that the Indians are my favorites to win the division, and have done a great job, while the Mariners haven’t, and that they’re a better team this year.
Chuck Armstrong, among others, has argued that the team’s commitment to spending money, even badly, has been an expression of the team’s compact with fans, part of a keep-showing-up-and-we-keep-spending pact.
In particular, they’ve mocked Cleveland a little, saying “they may be better off than we are, but they really tore down and they’re drawing ten thousand fewer fans a night now.”
Check out ESPN’s attendance numbers. The Mariners in their seven games averaged 29,330 fans. Cleveland so far has drawn 30,287 in three. Mind you, that’s 42k in the first home game and 25k/23k on a Sat/Sun (the M’s did 38k/27k against the A’s… but it looks like that gap’s closing.
Then what’s the argument? “If you hadn’t kept enabling us by coming out to the game, we would have built a better team faster?”
It’s entirely valid for the M’s to say that their situation’s much different than the Indians, or from any team — but the business side guys seem to want to bag on the Indians for what they’ve done, as if it’s alienated their entire fan base, while being unwilling to admit that their massive revenue streams make them much more like Boston, which has spent much more freely, and wisely, and accomplished greater things.
Anyway. I really like the Indians, it’s a well-run franchise, and this should be good baseball.
Tuesday is newsday, but not really
Johjima catching on quickly with M’s [Times]
The M’s had a real off day Monday. [PI] (Now there’s news, folks)
Also from the PI, I found these two Chicago links, in which the Everett-White Sox feud continues (but remember, he’s a team player and everyone who’s ever played with him loves him and has nothing bad to say).
Sun-Times
Tribune
The PI Answer Guy reveals that, as you probably noticed:
The team is experimenting with a new broadcasting format, in which the play-by-play announcers (Dave Niehaus, Rick Rizzs) do half the game on TV and half the game on radio, but the color commentators (Fairly, Dave Henderson, Dave Valle) stay either with the TV broadcast or the radio broadcast for the entire game.
(Advance warning: any comment with those names wrong gets nuked)
KUOW gig available for your listening pleasure
I had a great time: Jonah and I could (and sometimes do) talk baseball for hours, though he doesn’t plug his book in private conversations if you already own it. And I got to meet Larry Stone, Officially Endorsed Baseball Writer of USSM, and I gotta admit I was a little starstruck — I’m such a big fan.
Random Thoughts, Week One
[Watch as Dave usurpus the top spot from both JMB and DMZ. Hooray for eastern time.]
So, a week is in the books, and we stand at 3-4, built basically on a three game winning streak and the current three game losing streak. The team has looked both fantastic and terrible. What have I seen so far?
- The team scored 30 runs in seven games at Safeco Field against the toughest group of starting pitchers any team has faced so far this year. Colon, Harden, Lackey, and Zito are all borderline all-stars, Weaver and Loiaza are upper-tier mid rotation guys, and Blanton is a second year arm with some promise. Those pitchers are going to pose a challenge to any team. Scoring 30 runs in seven games against those arms is an accomplishment.
- Take away Felix’s velocity and command, and what do you have left? A guy with so much movement that teams still can’t get the ball out of the infield against him. That was as bad as Felix has looked since he got to the majors, stuff-wise, and he still dominated the A’s. This kid’s ridiculous.
- This team can’t win consistently without Adrian Beltre hitting like a major league third baseman. Right now, he’s the same guy he was last year. His pitch recognition is terrible, and he’s missing easily hittable balls. If ever there was a candidate for someone to watch hours and hours of video to learn how to read a ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand, it’s Beltre.
- Willie Bloomquist shouldn’t be an option in center field. That dive on the line drive on Saturday was one of the worst defensive plays you’ll ever see.
- Richie Sexson has one walk and nine strikeouts in 26 at-bats. And he’s the patient hitter in the line-up.
- For everyone concerned about the bullpen, don’t be. The M’s have options. Nageotte and Sean Green are showing off some nasty sinkers down in Tacoma. Green is a groundball machine, and even when he’s not missing bats, he’s tough.
- Three against Cleveland and three against Boston, all on the road? I’ll be thrilled if they can pull of a .500 road trip.
Big Board Updated
[Watch with wonder as Derek and Jason fight for top billing!]
At long last, the Big Board has been updated for the start of the 2006 season. Please see the link at left, under “features”.
Known issues:
1. Minor league links still point to BaseballAmerica.com, which as of this writing still shows player stats for the 2005 season. If they don’t get this updated pretty soon — their stats were pretty bad last year well into the season, if you recall — I’ll switch back to MinorLeagueBaseball.com links instead.
2. As a result of #1 above, there are no links for guys who didn’t appear in the minors last season. Examples include Kevin Appier, Dan Wright, and Adam Pettyjohn.
3. Teams have only played four games (three, in the case of Inland Empire), so it can be hard to figure out starting lineups. This is made worse by the fact that minor league teams often do things like rotate their players around, such that there isn’t a regular DH, for example.
4. Mozilla tends to freak out at Big Board updates. At least it does on my machine, getting the formatting all wrong. Hit refresh and you should be OK. By the same token, if you click on the link and see the old version, make sure you hit refresh. You probably have the old one stuck in your cache (which isn’t as painful as it might sound).
I’m happy to take feedback on other issues, such as incorrect handedness, misspelled names, bad links, and so on. Drop me a line or leave a comment on this post.